>> Amy Draves: Thank you so much for coming. My name is Amy Draves and I’m pleased to welcome
Linda Hill to the Microsoft Research Visiting Speaker Series. She will be discussing her book, “Collective
Genius,” in which she interviewed the best in the business to learn how they foster innovation on their
teams. She is the Dunham… sorry, Donham Professor of Business Administration in the Organizational
Behavior area at Harvard Business School where she chairs the Leadership Initiative and serves on the
faculty of the Leadership Best Practices Program. She has authored “Becoming a Manager,” and
coauthored, “Being the Boss,” which the Wall Street Journal named one of the five best business books
to read for your career in 2011. In 2013 she was named by Thinkers50 as one of the top ten
management thinkers in the world. Please join me in giving her a very warm welcome. [applause]
>> Linda Hill: Thank you. Well, it’s quite a pleasure to be here and it’s not only because you have no
snow, but I am always happy to be any place that has no snow—we are trying to break records in
Boston. And I also appreciate the chances to speak with you about something that truly is an obsession
of mine, and that is leadership and innovation. And I will tell you that this is my thirtieth year being a
professor at the Harvard Business School and, frankly, I’ve been trying to study this question for thirty
years, but I only got really, really serious about it about eleven or twelve years ago. And what I want to
share with you are some of the findings of a very systematic project we did looking at leadership and
innovation.
Like many organizations, the academy is quite siloed and it turns out that there’s a ton of research on
leadership and there’s a ton of research on innovation, but there’s not very much looking at the
connection between the two, and that’s what I want to speak with you about today. And the bottom
line of what we found is that, basically, what for many years I’ve been trying to help people learn how to
do, i.e. lead, then the models of leadership that we’ve been actually telling people that they should be
adopting, actually do not work when it comes to leading innovation. And that is not an easy thing for
me to say to you because this is something I have been doing for a number of years. So I want to talk to
you about what I do think is a model of thinking about leadership when you want to innovate, when you
want to build an organization that can innovate time and again. And that’s the question, that’s what we
mean by an exceptional leader of innovation. And we looked at both middle managers and senior
executives and CEOs who were leading either—you know—teams, business units, or enterprises. And
so I’m gonna be talking about people who worked in a range of different industries, and I do want to say
that we did do the project around the world. The other area that I do work in is on what does it take to
implement a global strategy? And I spend a ton of time in emerging markets, so in fact, research was
meant to be pretty global in its outlook. We obviously haven’t covered every country and we continue
to collect data. So the data that I’m gonna talk with you about… or from is really… at that point we had
studied sixteen exceptional leaders of innovation in depth for this particular project, and the “we” really
is a collaboration. So one individual, Emily, she joined when she was twenty-three. I understand that
she is a millennial; I am not, and it’s very important to have that point of view. The other two coauthors
that I have both are executives, or were executives. Greg was at Pixar. He was asked by Steve Jobs to
leave NeXT and go help scale Pixar; so he’s one of my coauthors. And the other is Kent Lineback who
worked in more traditional organizations, as he would put it. He just turned seventy, so we represent
four different decades. I just want to tell you that this is our collective work, not just mine. I think that’s
an important piece of the puzzle to talk about.
So these are the countries we visited. I’m an anthropologist, so what we have to do is spend time on the
ground observing up close and personal these individuals as they do their work. And so that is how we
did our research and then, obviously, we have field notes and go back and analyze that. So I just want to
tell you what the data are, and in fact we continued to collect data, and so now we have probably
twenty-six executives that we actually have studied. I’m going to be talking about some number of
these twelve, just to tell you though, these are the twelve that are in the book. And they all, as I said,
they represent different levels in the organization. Some I think you would say live in organizations that
are very friendly to innovation, others do not. And so I don’t know if you recognize any of those people;
I’ll tell you about a few of them. These are some of the organizations they come from, and indeed when
I’m talking about the connection between leadership and innovation, if they’re not the CEO, I’m not
trying to claim that the whole company is innovative. So the person that I actually studied at IBM was
the person who headed up Mergers and Acquisitions for the new business part of IBM. The person at
Pfizer is the general counsel of Pfizer.
We also have begun to study what I guess we would refer to as ecosystems and what looking at those
as well. So Calit2 is the hub of an ecosystem in San Diego to do biotech and nanotechnology work. So
we’ve looked at both organizations and these sort of ecosystems as we’ve began to do this research,
and frankly, now mostly we’re doing research on the ecosystems. And we’re looking in three different
countries: the UAE, Singapore, et cetera, because trying to combine this innovation and globalization
piece of the puzzle.
So first thing I want to just say is I want to define what… how we ended up defining innovation and this
basically reflects how the leaders that we spoke to defined it. They had a very broad definition of
innovation. So they saw innovation as being both incremental and breakthrough; it could be a product,
a service, a business model, a process, a way of organizing—very inclusive notions. For sure innovations
are something that are both new and also useful. If it’s just new, it’s creative; if it’s not useful, it’s not
an innovation. It’s just to create something that you’ve created. So it has to be both new and useful to
be defined as an innovation in our work. And so what I want to do first is show you this person. Do
many of you recognize this person? Yes. Very interesting. Often when I’m even in Silicon Valley most
people don’t recognize this person, which is sort of curious when you know who it is. You do recognize
these people. Yes, right? So that person you were looking at is the founder of Pixar; that is Ed Catmull.
He also is the person who just turned around over a number of years, Disney Animation. So he knows
how to build a company that can innovate, and he knows how to turn around a company. So I think
we’d say he’s an example of someone who’s pretty good at it. I think it’s actually very interesting and
we want to come back to the fact that most people don’t recognize Ed. And that sort of tells a little bit
about the kind of leadership that might be required when you’re leading innovation as well.
So again, Pixar, I think, is an organization we’d all say is innovative, and one of the things, it doesn’t
matter who you talk to—business people, if you talk to artists, if you talk to technologists. In my first
visit to Pixar was back in 2004 when they were working on “Ratatouille,” that lovely—you know—movie
about a rat becoming a master chef. I must say, when I saw the rat on the little… I thought, “What on
earth is this particular movie going to be about?” And you may recall that it took Pixar twenty years to
make the first full length computer generated movie. And I think we need to keep in mind how long it
really does take to do breakthrough innovation. Since that time, “Toy Story 2” came out in 1995,
they’ve actually… their fifteenth movie’s about to come out and it looks very good. I was just there a
couple of weeks ago. So they have been able to do this, and one of the things that they for sure know is
that innovation is not about some genius having an aha moment. Now one of the things that they say
at Pixar is that filmmaking is a team sport. And I’m just gonna build this out… let’s see, I’m gonna build it
all at once and just talk with you about it. So when we first went to Pixar someone sort of drew a
picture like this so that we’d understand what their process was. And he did it reluctantly because he
thought it looked a little bit too neat, even despite all those arrows. So for sure what he said is, “You
know, Linda, it’s a very messy process, it’s a very iterative process, but there is a logic to it.” And one of
the things that you may or may not know is it takes about two hundred fifty to three hundred people
four to five years to make one of these movies. So it’s definitely a team sport, it’s not about one solo
person—you know—getting it right immediately. It also is the case that they frequently have had to
change directors. So—you know—again, doesn’t always work out as well as one would like.
Now, what happens when you make one of these movies and—many of you may be in parts of the
business that you really have lived this—is that shots or scenes move through the pipeline—the
production pipeline—at different speeds, and they don’t move in order, depending on how difficult the
particular scene will be. So it turns out, for instance, that the scene—which is not a very difficult scene,
actually—the scene where the little boy hands a piece of chocolate to a bird in “Up,”—I don’t know how
many of you have seen that movie—that particular scene took one of their top animators six months to
perfect. Now, if you look at something like Sulley—you know—in “Monster’s, Inc.,” for which they won
an Academy Award—his hair is like mine—I like to tell this story because someone actually got an
academy award for doing this, okay, and I know how hard it is, so that feels good to me. And I must
confess when I first went to Google and met people they all asked me, “Did you meet the man that did
Sulley’s hair? How did that happen? How… that’s really, really difficult.” So that’s very difficult, it took
ages. The shadows under the cars and that ray tracing—very, very difficult task as well. So things move
through at different speeds, and one of the things they say at Pixar is the whole… nothing is done until
the whole movie wraps. And so what that means is that things, again, really do iterate all along the way.
And one scene… there was a scene that an animator did and he drew sort of an arched eyebrow to a
character, and he showed that to the director and the director saw that and said, you know, “Well done,
but not how I imagine the character, so lose it.” So, lost it, went away after all that work. Couple of
weeks later the director comes back and says, “Where are those few seconds?” Pulls it out, looks at it,
decides to include those scenes, or those moments, in the film. And what they say at Pixar when that
happens is that that individual animator was able to share his slice of genius with the director, and as a
consequence help the director have a much more subtle nuance sense of that character and therefore
improve the story. So the problem you always face when you’re trying to innovate, if you want to get
the new you have to figure out how to unleash the ideas of the individual, but if you want to get the
useful you have to figure out how to harness those ideas into a solution that is really—you know—
gonna solve a problem that the group has, a collective problem.
So how do you get that unleashing and that harnessing to happen is what we were trying to look at.
And so that’s what the process… and I’ll talk about some paradoxes that are really imbedded in that
unleashing and harnessing process that really are at the heart of leading innovation. So this process of
trying to figure out how to do this time and time again is what we wanted to understand. What was it?
How did Ed think about what he was doing that led him to create an organization that could do that?
And what we ended up realizing as we looked through our data is that no matter what kind of
organization we were looking at, whether it was an Islamic bank in Dubai or a luxury brand in Korea, all
of these organizations had three capabilities and they are organizational capabilities. And I want to tell
you a little bit about each. The first one is a Creative Abrasion. This capability is about how you actually
engage in debate and discourse to create a marketplace of ideas. And what these organizations
understand is that you do not get innovation without diversity and conflict. Those are really critical
ingredients for any innovation. So what you see in these organizations is that they actually amplify
difference, they don’t minimize it, because that difference or those differences are, again, the resource
you’re gonna rely on to figure out an innovative solution to some problem you’re trying to solve. So
what they do, again, is you might do brainstorming to get some, but in the end, you actually want to
have heated debate and it has to be constructive, and that’s not easy. So that creative abrasion is how
you begin to unleash those ideas.
The second thing you need to do is Creative Agility, and this is about how you refine that portfolio of
ideas that you’ve come up with and figure out which ones you should pursue. And here this is very
much like what you see with design thinking, some combination of—you know—discovery driven
learning where you act your way to an answer you don’t plan your way to an answer. So what you see
in these organizations, as one of them told us is, “We run experiments, we don’t run pilots.” If you run a
pilot and it doesn’t work, then something was wrong or someone failed. There’s too much political stuff
around it. When you run an experiment, you run it to learn. So if you get—you know—an outcome
that’s not “the right outcome,” there’s no right outcome, you’ve learned from it, you take that
information and you try again; you experiment again. So the second capability is this Creative Agility;
being able to do those experiments, really pay attention to the feedback, take it seriously and make the
necessary adjustments.
And then the final one is Creative Resolution. And this is about the fact that as you all know and I’m
sure have experienced, most innovations are not brand new. Very dangerous to say you’ve discovered
something that no one’s discovered before because someone probably has discovered some version of
it. Most innovations are actually combinations of old ideas or old ideas reconfigured to solve new
problems. So you have to have a way of doing decision making that will allow you to do both/and as
opposed to either/or thinking. So if people’s ideas come out, instead of one person having to win, you
make decisions in a way that you can combine them. So what you do see in these organizations is that
people are not willing to go along to get along—not in the least. In fact, they will not compromise,
because that is the easier path. They will also not let one group or individual dominate; so they don’t let
the people who are higher in the hierarchy dominate and they don’t let the experts dominate. And I will
tell you that expert piece is actually one of the more complicated parts of the process. How do you
keep, if you will, the experts from dominating, when in fact, you’re trying to make a decision about
which way to go?
So these are three capabilities that we saw in all of these organizations: creative abrasion, creative
agility, and then creative resolution. And so when you build these capabilities, this is what allows you,
actually, to engage in the innovative process.
Now this gentleman, I don’t think most of you would recognize either, but you probably on some level
know about him. I think he was employee number eight or nine, Bill, to… in Google, and he was the
Senior Vice President of Engineering at Google and so built the website and—you know—we all… it
works pretty well; very rarely goes down, twenty-four seven. He’s really good at what he does. And I
do remember, as a person slightly older, I was very happy to see when I went to look at his group—you
know—everybody wasn’t necessarily young and playing volleyball; they either had gray hair or they
were bald, and I appreciated that. [laughter] So Google did not play when they tried to figure out who
should build their website. They actually went to Bell Labs; he was one of the finest leader at Bell Labs,
he brought over a team, added some people to it to build that website. We looked at them as they
were trying to take on Gmail and YouTube—we like to look at organizations over time—and as you know
better than I do that the storage demands for YouTube or Gmail is very different than Search and so we
were very curious to see how are they gonna respond to that. And so for sure I was really curious as a—
you know—professor, I was very interested to see how they’re gonna put this team together to come up
with what to do about this. Well, Bill did nothing. He sort of didn’t choose a team, instead he said let’s
just watch spontaneously and see what comes up. And what came up were two different approaches to
how to respond to Gmail and YouTube. One was somewhat more evolutionary, the other more
revolutionary. And these two teams just emerged. And so Bill said, “You know what? We’re gonna let
these teams play out their point of view.” And he allowed them to work on their models, or their
solutions, if you will, or potential solutions, for two years full time. And as he said, they were working at
breakneck speed, again, to remind us how hard it is, actually, to do breakthrough kind of work. And
what he basically did is allow two parallel experiments to be run, and the role of the leader in all of that
was to make sure they were honest. He said, “The leader’s role is to inject honesty into their process
and also to make sure that they debate.” And so what they were encouraged to do—again, would not
surprise you—was to build their prototypes pretty quickly and to test or bump up—was the word he
used—their prototypes up against different users; the next thing that Google wanted to do, the group
that would have to get up in the middle of the night if the website—you know—went down, et cetera,
so that they could discover for themselves the strengths and weaknesses of their particular approach.
Now, while this was happening, the engineers were complaining because Google actually had a shortage
of engineering talent, and they said, “You just need to pick or you need to get the team that’s the best
team and you need to let them go at it.” He said, “No, leave well enough alone. Just do the discovery
process.” Eventually a lot of data sort of coming in about which one’s working better or not, as well as
the website’s getting a little wobbly and gonna be a problem, so they have to make a choice. “And this
is the moment,” he said, “that this is really critical when you’re a leader,” because one solution was
going to be selected and one wasn’t. And so he did that, but in doing that, he said, “This is where social
architecture comes in as a leader.” You gotta make sure that the group that “loses” gets adopted by the
new group that is doing the next generation of work, so you don’t lose what they have learned and they
feel like they’ve made a contribution because they truly have, it’s not just perception. So the whole
process was to get some of the members of “the losing team” to be adopted by the new team that was
working on the next big thing. And that happened very seamlessly and when that next big thing came
out, those people saw their work. So he almost always did things by having these parallel experiments
run, making sure you don’t lose the learning, because frankly, most innovations don’t work, and you’ve
increased your probability by two, he thinks, of getting an answer that might work when you have two
teams working at it, and though many people might view that as very inefficient, in his mind, extremely
efficient. Extremely efficient way to actually get done what innovations need to happen and they pretty
much did most of their innovation that way, having these parallel teams running experiments and his
role, again, was to make sure to inject honesty, that they’re really paying attention to the feedback
they’re getting when they test their prototypes and moving it forward. So that was the way just to
illustrate the process they went through. You could see the kind of the creative abrasion that happened
there, a little bit of the… a lot of the agility, and then the resolution when you combine these things,
different combinations get used in different generations along the way.
So what this person told us, one of the engineers who was most adamant that—you know—Bill was
wasting time and energy here by doing things this way, he said when they finished this process, he said,
“You know what I’ve learned is, I think Bill’s right. First off, you need to keep these teams at sort of a
human scale; and if he had made those two teams become one team, they would not have focused on
what’s the best… what’s the right answer, if you will, or the better answer. They would have been trying
to prove who was the winner and who was the loser. They would not have been able to work
constructively because they were so passionate about their particular approach. So for him—going back
to yes, you need diversity in conflicts—some conflict’s going to be healthy; others, people aren’t gonna
be able to see it, not at that point anyway, and better to keep them separate and run the experiments
and make sure you don’t lose the learning.
So what we actually did see about these leaders—and Bill was one of the ones who told us this—Bill said
to us, he said, “You know, I’m… and he…I don’t really read books on leadership, because when I read
books on leadership they actually sort of just depress me, because on the first page it says you’re
supposed to have a vision, or an answer.” He said, “The only reason I took this job at Google is I had no
vision, I had no answer; that’s what gets me up every morning. So I guess I don’t lead; these books
aren’t relevant. And Linda, isn’t it the case if you’re trying to do something that’s cutting edge and
breakthrough, you have no vision? I mean, how does this work?” So we had about four leaders sort of
say to us, “This doesn’t work so well when I think about, when I read about leadership, because that
doesn’t fit what I do.” So I was saying to Amy, I ended up having to write, “Being the Boss,” with Kent
because then the models of leadership we had were not fitting what we were discovering as we were
collecting the data for this research. And so what these individuals did or how they thought about what
leadership was about, is they did not see themselves—let me just skip through these pieces, I don’t
think we… they did not see themselves as being the visionary who created a vision, communicated that
vision and inspired others to want to fulfill that vision. That’s not how they saw their role. I will tell you
that every person we studied was a visionary. They definitely were visionaries; and it may be to be
credible in some of the worlds they lived in, if you’re not a visionary yourself, people don’t want to play
with you. So I don’t know the answer to that. It’s partly because of the way we selected these
individuals. Having said that, I also want to say there’s very much a place for visionary leadership. It
really is about leading change, but it is not about leading innovation; because if you were trying to get
people to innovate what you really need to focus on is how do you create a context in which people will
be willing and able to innovate. Because innovation is a journey; it’s a collaborative kind of problem
solving that indeed involves this discovery-driven learning, with lots of missteps, lots of even failures.
And the other part of it is these combination of ideas.
And the final thing that we have to remember about innovation is it’s very exhilarating work to do, but
it’s also can be very demanding, debilitating and emotionally complicated work to do. It’s intellectually
complicated and it’s emotionally complicated.
So I want to tell you one story about Greg, my coauthor from Pixar. Greg… we did put this in the book;
he said, “I can’t believe we’re gonna put this in the book,” but anyway we did because it’s so central to
what actually happened, the history of Pixar, and also to understanding the story. So Greg was the head
of systems at Pixar and you all have read about Steve Jobs, of course, and obviously he’s pretty good at
what he does if Steve asked him to go over and take on that role at Pixar. Well they had four or five,
depending on how you want to count it, redundant systems for making sure they didn’t lose a movie.
Another storage problem; I didn’t realize storage was so hard until I got into this and now I know how
hard storage is. But anyway, they lost “Toy Story 2”… “Toy Story,” they lost “Toy Story,” not “Toy Story
2”—they had “Toy Story 2,” they lost” Toy Story,” even though they had these four or five redundant
systems. And you know if you lose it, if it’s no longer to be found on storage, it does not exist because
these movies are numbers, right? So Greg… they looked and they cannot find it anywhere because of “a
perfect storm.” There was a problem that maybe you all heard about at the time too—we’re going back
in history a bit—there was a problem that no one realized existed in the way you thought about creating
these redundant systems, and they discovered it. So “Toy Story” is gone, this is not a good thing. He has
to go tell Ed that they cannot find “Toy Story.” So he goes to tell Ed, “Cannot find ‘Toy Story.’ It is not
here.” And it turns out after they did a postmortem that it was only one human error in the whole
process, at the very end. The last copy. The other four just went even though they were doing the
best… the way you were supposed to do it, right? Yes, I want you to have nightmares tonight.
[laughter] Anyway, so what was… what happened was he went to Ed and he said, “It’s gone, can’t find
it.” So Ed’s first comment to him was, “This must be a really hard problem if you’ve lost that movie
because you are really good. I had no idea that we were that far out on the cutting edge and it is not
good. This is not the kind of failure you want. This is bad failure, right? I had no idea we were there.
We have to go tell Steve.” So they went to tell Steve that they had lost “Toy Story,” and you can only
imagine, and what Steve’s first words were, “This must be a really hard problem if you’ve lost ‘Toy
Story.’ I had no idea we were out there on the cutting edge like that.” That was his first reaction. Now,
interestingly enough, before we could hear his second one, they were able to say… but he had the same
reaction as Ed, interesting… just very similar reaction, “You all are really good. How did we lose this
movie?” They were able to say, “We found it.” And the reason they were able to say they found it was
because of the culture of the place, the willingness, they want to go back to that. So they found it
because it turned out there was a woman who was on maternity leave and she had wanted to still play
and do the movie, right? So they paid ninety thousand dollars to let her have a computer at home—
‘cause that’s what it cost to have a computer at her home that would actually be able to deal with—you
know—a “Toy Story,”… the kind of data you needed. She was on maternity leave and busy with her
baby and didn’t realize they were looking for the movie. At some point she actually went to the
computer and saw that the movie was there. She said, “Are you looking for the movie? I have a copy.”
Now if you know anything about movies and studios, movies don’t leave the grounds, right? Well, at
Pixar, everybody sees the movie. Anybody who’s there is allowed to see the movie, send comments to
the director. They don’t all have permission to take it off the grounds, but indeed, she had the movie, so
they were able to say to Steve, “Guess what? But we found it.” And as a consequence of that, when
you look at the credits of movies from Pix—the credits are very long at Pixar because they believe that
you should be generous with credit—but listed on there, you may not recognize it, are the names of
babies born during a movie, and now you know why, okay. Because it takes a village, is what they said,
to include the babies that are about to be born, to make one of those movies really get made. And
when they actually gave out the bonuses for that movie, someone had said to Steve Jobs, “We should
give a bonus to the people that did “Toy Story.” And he said, “No, we should not give a bonus to those
people. We need to give a bonus to everybody in the studio—the person who made the hamburgers to
the director. They all deserve it.” And what everybody got was, I believe, thirteen weeks times
whatever their salary was. Because, again, everybody has a slice of genius—they’re not all equal—but
everybody had a contribution to make, so therefore Steve handed out to everybody twelve or thirteen
times whatever their salary was because everybody mattered to the making of that movie. So that’s the
kind of culture that they want to build to make sure people are willing to do this.
And embedded in the process of unleashing and harnessing… and I just want to… I’m not gonna talk
through all these things or we can come back to it with your questions, but those first two paradoxes
have to do with creative abrasion. And one of the things I do want to just point out about those first
two is if you don’t provide enough support or psychological safety in the environment, people will not
share their ideas, particularly when their working with other really, really talented people. One of the
challenges you have at a place like Pixar or even Google is you have really, really capable people. How
do you get the new person who’s coming in who’s just starting to learn how to animate, to actually tell a
John Lasseter how he actually feels about what’s been done? How do you create that creative abrasion
unless there’s a lot of psychological safety or support. You also need to have the confrontation.
The next two are about… these are about agility and these two are about decision making. So in these
organizations, decision making is very clear who, in the end, gets to make the decision, but it’s relatively
inclusive and patient. So again, what you see is that we allow people to have input, a lot of input;
everybody really knows who’s going to make the decisions in the end. But again… and we’re gonna be
patient and we’re gonna let you go for two years, if you will, at Google, eventually it’s gonna become
urgent and guess what? Bill’s gonna step up and say now we make a decision, it’s gonna happen, and he
does it in a very top down way ‘cause it needs to go on. So again, you’re trying to unleash and harness
and you’re constantly recalibrating across these as you’re trying to think about exercising those
capabilities. So I don’t want to… these little people move because, you realize Greg is an animator; this
is supposed to move more than this. I’ve taken out most of the movement. [laughter] Did you see
how…? I’m a professor who writes in words, he thinks in pictures, but anyway, those little people… his
people move much more than mine, I will tell you.
I’m not going to… this is about the community, the sense… the kind of culture. So the capabilities are
the process you need to be able to do, this is the kind of culture you need to build to allow for people to
engage in those capabilities. And we called it a community culture because, fundamentally, people feel
like they are a part of a community, they care about the collective. And at the heart of it is some sense
of purpose, and if you don’t have this sense of purpose, it’s very hard for people to be willing to do this
work, and why should I bother unless I really care about the purpose? So the person that we studied
who makes luxury bags in Korea, for instance, she wants you to pay a lot of money for them. One of the
things that she talks about though, is that the reason why she went into the luxury brand business is
that Asian women are the market that many, many companies hope to get to buy these goods. And she
felt it was really a problem that Asian women weren’t in the business because luxury becomes how you
define yourself. And she thought it was important to have an Asian woman with a different sensibility in
that business to help, as you will—you know—as China, et ceteras, that was all happening, that there
was a voice of the Asian women in the process. And when she… that is what her business is about, and
actually she has a very large foundation that’s connected to the business as well. But one of the things
that’s interesting about this purpose is, okay, that’s Mrs. Kim, so as I went to ask other people—you
know—how do they… and Mrs. Kim in Korea—chairman… chairperson Kim as they called her—it’s a very
different culture. People wouldn’t even sit, they stand when she’s speaking and it’s… but she had to
figure out how to create this kind of culture, so she does a lot of business on airplanes when they have
no choice but to sit next to her. [laughter] That’s a… different ways to break down what goes on here,
and I must say when I interviewed some of the Brits and Italian men who work for her, et cetera, I said,
“What do you feel about this purpose stuff?” “You know, I thought that was nonsense. I just wanted to
work with her ‘cause she knows how to build brands, but you know what? After I’ve been in this
company for a while, this purpose really does matter and really is affecting how I’m making choices
about doing the business.” And there’s a culture that gets built. I don’t think you’d be surprised by
these values. All of these organizations have very different cultures, but they all on some level have
these values: the bold ambition, they all have appetites that are much bigger than their capabilities, so
they do not value risk and they do not value failure. Just want to point that out because when you have
bold ambition you’re gonna take risks and you’re gonna have some failures, but that’s not valued per se.
Very deep sense of responsibility. These are some of their rules about how you’re supposed to interact.
These are easy words to say, but difficult to live. One of the most interesting one’s that… here that I just
want to mention is that one of the most important roles of a leader they think, is to make sure that the
minority voice gets heard. And interestingly enough, the other project… as I said I work on globalization,
but one of the other, if you will, leader’s that I‘ve sort of been studying was Nelson Mandela, who I did
have the privilege of meeting ‘cause I’m—you know—he’s a social revolutionary as far as I’m concerned,
very much also agrees with these notions of leadership. But one of the things that he talked a whole lot
about is making sure that minority voice is heard. And if you look at actually how they even went
through their constitution process, very, very interesting process that he thought about it and what his
role as the leader was in helping with that, but this issue of trust and respect even for people who—you
know—obviously were “your enemy” or maybe didn’t treat you so well, was one of the things about him
as a leader that actually made a huge difference in what they were able to come up with.
The other piece that we didn’t see right away is there are also rules about how you’re supposed to think
about problems. And this is actually quite important when you have diverse people trying to struggle
with something that we have some rules about how we think, that we’re supposed to be very holistic in
our approach and we’re supposed to be data-driven. And what that really means is you may not have
data to prove your point of view, but you need to be able to… you have to be able to admit to people
that you have no data; it’s your gut. You just tell people what’s your evidence for what you’re believing
about x, y, z, and those rules actually help make it much easier for us to get through certain debates that
we need to have about things. It also makes sure that when we’re looking at the results of experiments
we don’t reject those results and say, “Oh, that was a wrong experiment,” et cetera. So there were
rules about that. Just… and once you do that, you do get that sense of direction, ‘cause I think people
worry, “Well, if you don’t have purposes different than vision,” it’s not about where we’re going,
purpose is about who we are. It’s about our collective identity, which is a different, different task. Just
want to tell you, this man I met when he was at Fiat. He was the CEO of Fiat when they did the
rejuvenation of the Fiat 500. He then went to Volkswagen and he was the Chief Marketing Officer of all
nine brands—very interesting job. As well as the Marketing Officer for the Volkswagen brand, he’s now
the head of Sales and Marketing for Audi. So we’ve studied him in all of those different contexts, again,
to see if we see, is it him that’s sort of making the difference? And this is Luca, an Italian, who had to
learn German very quickly when he went to Volkswagen, because that is the official language of
Volkswagen. And one of the things he did, he gave the Germans a little bit of a scare. This is in… it’s a
marvel, I mean, obviously Volkswagen’s quite a fine company, that‘s Luca standing here and this is his
first meeting of the hundred and fifty-three marketing professionals from around the world—they’d
never come together—and he wanted them… you can’t teach people or have people think their way
into being different, you have to force them to act their way into being different, so he used space, as a
lot of the people we studied, to do that. And so this is one of their first sort of strategy meetings and I’m
not… I use power point all the time so I’m not being negative, but they were not allowed to bring any
presentations to this meeting, and as you’ll see there’s no chairs, so this was a little confusing. It’ very
choreographed, but it’s… these are their laboratories. So instead of, if you will, having sort of strategy
meetings per se, they now have laboratories which would not maybe so un… so confusing to you. And
they do work in a very different way because he wanted them to get comfortable. He wanted to give
them positive shocks to behave very differently in how they began to think about things and in different
combinations. And this is one of the ways he used to break down hierarchy and get people to engage in
different ways. So the other thing in terms of purpose that became very important, you have to go back
to the DNA of a company often to figure out what that purpose can be. And at Volkswagen, it really is if
you know the people’s car. So what they have decided their battleground for innovation is really around
sustainability. This is… fundamentally, it’s actually Volkswagen’s—even owned partly by the
government—it’s very much that kind of model, so they ended up “Think Blue” is their sustainability
model. And his problem is being the head of Marketing and Sales is that at Volkswagen it was the
engineers who were the creatives or the innovators, not marketing and sales people. But he said, “You
cannot have an innovative brand unless marketing and sales are also innovative. Brands are built from
the inside out.” So part of the dilemma was to show them that they also were innovators—right—again,
why you have to have that broader definition of what innovation is about.
This man is a fun… very fun person. He was the CEO of something called HCL Technologies and some of
you may know HCL Technologies… you do? All too well? Do you work with them? Actually you know…
>>: We work with them, yeah. Most of our vendors… [indiscernible]
>> Linda Hill: Aha. So, yes. So do you know Vineet?
>>: No.
>> Linda Hill: So Vineet was… he was… at the time when he was appointed CEO he was a very young
CEO, particularly for India and he was appointed by one of the founders. So HCL was the technology
company that actually started the computer business in India and they ended up by 2005 being number
five and about to become irrelevant even though they founded the business. And we know we all worry
about this kind of thing. And so he was asked by one of the founders to turn around HCL. And when
you look at the turn around, that visionary leadership, you see very much in terms of the change process
that they went through. What he tried to create at the end of it was a different kind of model of how
they would think about leadership. And so Vineet, one of the… these are his… maybe you know some of
these people, I don’t know, they may be a little older than this picture. He said, “Looking at the
demographics of India, what we need to be able to do was we have to turn over the growth of the
company to these people. This is the future of the company. So we as leaders must recast our notion of
what leadership is about. It can’t be about setting direction and making sure people don’t deviate from
it,” which is fundamentally what they had been taught leadership was about. And in India, again, pretty
hierarchical, they needed to do something different, and he talked about “inverting the pyramid.” And
this is one of their pictures. And what you’re doing when you invert the pyramid is you unleash the
power of the many by loosening the stranglehold of the few, and you know who the few are here. So
many people did leave, but many people stayed, other people came. It… complicated process that
they’ve gone through here to try to create a different way of thinking about leadership, but he said, “We
need to operate, kind of like the Google’s and the Pixar’s and the whatever’s,” and he visited those
places with me; we introduced our leaders to each other. Again, no company is perfect, but these are
the kinds of results that they obviously got from the shift, so they’re real, they’re financial. One of the
things that happened over time in this organization in terms of trying to be more innovative, is they’ve
ended up—and this is what we’re studying right now—they ended up figuring out a way of what they
call, business finance, so they can show every individual employee who’s working with a client how
much money their work has actually… how much they’ve helped that client financially with what they’re
doing. That meant creating a very different way of keeping track of the finances to be able to do this,
and each individual up on the website, it will tell them what has been your contribution to this particular
client, because what you’re supposed to do now is go “beyond the contract.” You must meet the
contract, which they need to do that because otherwise we’re not going to be hired again, that’s what
we’re supposed to do, but if you don’t go beyond the contract—this is beyond for this individual—then
you haven’t really added value to your customer. And that’s what you need to do. So in part, without
walking through all the piece of the puzzle right now in terms of the culture shift and the change of
leadership, this is what they’ve been driving toward and, indeed, they’re still working on that.
I’m going to stop right now. I’m going to skip this one as we’ve been talking about these ecosystems.
You all can have all these slides, there’s some questions for you to think about here about—you know—
for your particular team, what’s going on? What I want to do now is just… and with this last piece about
the leadership part of it—because I think this is the part that’s a really tricky one—and again, I don’t
think it’s accidental that you maybe don’t recognize Ed, because what you do see about these leaders is
that they understand that leadership is more about being the person who sets the stage as opposed to
the person who performs on the stage. When you’re really, really talented yourself, it is not easy to be
the stage setter as opposed to the performer. And one of the real challenges you have—and actually
Nelson Mandela talked a lot about this—is how do you create space for other people when you can take
up all the space yourself? And that’s really one of the dilemmas, I think that many of the leaders had.
So I’d like to just end with that leadership thought and take your questions and we can go in any
direction you’d like. Was that… Did that give you an overview of what the basic story is? Make sense?
Yep? Yes?
>>: So when you interviewed those millionaire, how do you actually decide it’s because their
contribution to make company more innovative or do they just happen to inherit good people and good
environment?
>> Linda Hill: So, I act… this is terrible for me to say, but anyway, I attended the University of Chicago, so
I do know about statistics. I am an ethnographer and I have definitely sampled on the deep end of
variable, right? So I’m very aware of that as opposed to doing the comparison. And one of the things
that I try to do is to study people over time. So as I described Luca, I’ve actually seen him in three or
four different contexts over time. I can’t prove it because I am an ethnographer, should tell you that. So
I would say that what we did to do this is we went through our, if you will, rolodexes in some ways and
said, “Introduce us to…” we said, “Who are some of the leaders that everybody would say are really,
really innovative, have created these organizations and have been very innovative, or ones that we see
are trying to change?” So when we met Vineet, it was when he first started to take over and try to
change this company into an innovative company. The thing about Ed which has been interesting
besides—you know—obviously they survived—and I don’t mean it in a negative way—but they’ve been
acquired by Disney. When I met them they weren’t acquired; they’ve gone through a lot of change.
He’s also gone to Disney and been able to help turn around Disney animation. So I don’t have proof, but
I think that because we’ve looked at them over… we actually committed to collecting data for about ten
years just to see, right? And I think everything is complicated, so we still watch to see what’s going on
here. But I can’t—you know—I don’t have the numbers for you in that sense. Yes, thank you.
>>: So a lot of your information is about leading from the top [indiscernible].
>> Linda Hill: Yes, right.
>>: I don’t know how many CEOs are in this room right now, but I wondered, does the story change at
all when you start talking about trying to show leadership from in the middle of an organization versus
at the top.
>> Linda Hill: It… so, quick answer: the process and what they’re up to is the same. So one of the
people we studied was a relatively middle manager in a company, I act… this is a company that actually
told us we could not write about them, the CEO either, because they don’t pull out individuals because
they have such a collective notion. This is a manufacturing company that you have many of their
products in your home. I was really disappointed that we couldn’t write about them. But one of the
things which I think happens a lot—which is not so much a part of the story I just told you, which is the
story in “Being the Boss”—is how you manage your network. So if you’re in the middle, how you
manage up and how you manage across is critical. It’s true and when you’re more senior as well, but
that’s a big piece of the story. So I must confess, when we wrote “Being the Boss,” the second
imperative of leadership is managing relationships with people over whom you have no formal
authority, which actually… these books don’t completely gel this way, but that’s a bigger… they do that
and one person, her boss told her, “You know, you’re… this is career ending for you if this doesn’t
work.” But she thought, “Guess what? It’s going to work, and if I do it your way it’s certainly not gonna
work ‘cause we’re not gonna innovate enough.” But that managing up piece is critical.
>>: Okay.
>> Linda Hill: Is that… but the actual capabilities and the kind of culture… but they built a subculture
because that subculture doesn’t fit the culture around them. Managing that is really very tricky.
>>: Do you then… the task at hand is actually to build your network and your local culture that can bring
forth those three capabilities for innovation and then you have to find a way to make that work within
the wider…
>> Linda Hill: Which in the wider if it’s… the general counsel of Pfizer, she actually was building her ec…
it was an ecosystem of the lawyers; they would move to something called the Pfizer Legal Alliance:
nineteen firms doing seventy-five percent of the work being paid a fixed cost instead of billable hours
and trying to create those competitors to be in a community with… that was one of the ecosystems we
looked at. I mean, having to manage relationships with the whole company—she’s pretty senior—the
other parts of the company didn’t want—you know—you picked the nineteen… not my favorite law firm
that I like to work with, et cetera. So she also… it’s not that even the very senior people don’t have to
manage the network. They do. I don’t want to imply that, but for sure, you don’t—you know—you’re
not the CEO so you’ve got to make sure… you’ve got these other people who have to buy in.
>>: Thank you.
>> Linda Hill: Yes.
>>: So I have two things. One is someone online actually called out someone they consider to be an
innovative leader in this room and it’s, Diane Wagner. I had to say that. I’m not sure if she’s still here…
>> Linda Hill: Okay.
>>: …’cause she was hoping that she could actually speak to her experience at Microsoft with being an
innovation leader. And then the second question is, if you’re not considered a visionary, how do you
lead innovation?
>> Linda Hill: Well, I don’t… if you’re not considered a visionary, therefore no one will allow you to do it.
I think you… well, the person I’m talking about… another person that I… actually is not in this study—let
me go to a different person—but someone I’ve actually studied… as I said, this has been a passion since
day one. So the first case I ever wrote at the Harvard Business School—because I’m very intelligent—
was about... let me—you’ll see what I mean by this—was about a woman named Suzanne de Passe, and
I don’t know if you know who she is, but she was responsible for taking care of Michael Jackson. And so
she was doing Motown 25 and helping him with the moonwalk, and that was the first research project I
did, ‘cause I figured if I’m gonna be a professor, I may as well have fun, right? So this is how… so my first
case I’m sitting next to Stevie Wonder and Smokey Robinson and Eric Clapton comes in to play music
with them. And I knew I had picked the right job, right? That’s how smart I am. So ever since way back
then I’ve always studied people and worked and done consulting with people who worked with really,
really creative, innovative souls, right? So that… this has been a passion. So again, it’s something I’ve
actually been looking at in some form or fashion for a really long time. And I think in that context—I
don’t know—is Diane here? Yes. Oh, my friend back here. Yes, we were discussing… yes. So I think
that you want to answer that?
>> Diane Wagner: I’m not sure I heard the question.
>> Linda Hill: They want you to…
>>: [indiscernible]
>>: I didn’t know that. So you have a fan out in the Ethernet who said that he considers you to be an
absolute leader in this model.
>> Diane Wagner: So I think that that individual is a gentleman named Cristiano Suzuki. “Hi Cristiano.”
>> Linda Hill: Oh, okay.
>> Diane Wagner: And he’s the one who directed the TED talk and we tried to create the kind of
environment that you described in terms of having not [indiscernible] but a group culture where we
could bring people together and that people were heard regardless of where they [indiscernible] in the
organization. I thought your question about how you manage from the middle is quite relevant in that
regard. It’s not about who is the person at the top of the org chart, it’s about where are the ideas and
how do you get people to come along with you and bring the… have good ideas and then bring the
organization along with them. So I’m not sure if that’s what Cristiano was referring to…
>> Linda Hill: Well, I think—you know—the visionary piece, I was gonna say that I got a little bit off, but I
would say that when I mentioned the thing about Suzanne, I’ve actually—the reason I bring this up is—
I’ve always studied people who’ve been… done very innovative or creative things or worked with very
creative people in extreme. I’m actually very interested in who you work with extremely talented
people because there’s a theory that in… and my colleague who’s two doors down from me writes
about, “You don’t want to have too many cooks in the kitchen,” right? The problem, you only want to
have… and, I mean, Ed Catmull just laughs when he reads that, he’s like, “You gotta have a ton of cooks
in the kitchen if you’re trying to do breakthrough stuff.” You have to learn how to get those cooks to
cook together—right—that’s the key. And how you carry yourself and behave is a part of getting them
to do that. So one of the people I studied—going back, this would be for the study—was not considered
visionary, not a very good leader or any of those things, and did this. And partly the problem is you
don’t stand out necessarily. And she said, “You know what? It’s gonna work and I’m gonna get credit in
the end.” But you have to be comfortable with that, and people didn’t recognize how visionary she
actually was about a whole bunch of stuff. Her team did, but her bosses and others didn’t. So I don’t
know that—you know—the usual suspect… and Mrs. Kim, most of her company is actually divorced
women, or a large number of them… the people work there, who in Korea don’t really have much
standing. And, again, people that you wouldn’t see as being very innovative, I mean a couple of… they
have—you know—Golden Week, you all probably know about, they have beat Prada and Louis Vuitton
many weeks, this little company in China, with certain things. So I think that they’re often… the last part
of our book is about invisibles: stylistic invisibles, demographic invisibles, and—you know—where does
talent… who has a slice of genius? I think that what you do see about these leaders is they’re very
generous in who they see as being able to contribute, frankly. But if you’re not seen as a visionary, it is
more complicated. You don’t get those assignments, right? But if you do your work in a particular way,
people see and are attracted to work with you, and her group grew over time—this one who wasn’t
seen that way and really ended up being quite successful. Yes?
>>: So I’m quite understood on this notion of creative abrasion. How was it that you… that these
leaders keep the abrasion and the discussions and the debate creative as opposed to just abrasive?
>> Linda Hill: Well that’s… yeah. That’s a very long answer. One of the things… one goes back to the…
to be… to you really do need to have the culture in part, right? So if you are in an environment where
we do trust each other, what trust means in this model is we assume everybody is well intentioned. You
just assume it. Now if you could assume that, just imagine how much energy that releases, right? And if
you behave in ways that you’re not assuming that people are well intentioned, someone… the boss is
gonna… the leader or boss is gonna say to you, “Guess what? Get with the program.” Alright, so that
makes it much easier, right? If you assume everyone’s well intended and…
>>: And pull them up, pull people up or comment or help them or point out if they’re not being well
intentioned.
>> Linda Hill: Right. These leaders, one of the times they actually are most likely to intervene is when
you violate one of the rules of engagement. And the other thing is if you… so that… but that’s only, I
mean, it’s not easy… the other thing is you’ve got to keep the abrasion alive—right—because after you
get to know each other really well then you might not abrade as much. So one of the things—I’m just
using Pixar in part because we know it a bit in some level—is they do know when you need to bring in
new people, when you actually need to mix in new people in that brain trust because you all become
too alike in your thinking. So the leaders are very actively encouraging or even when I asked Bill at
Google, “What advice would you give to new leaders?” He gave me two pieces of advice to give you.
One is: assume you’re leading a volunteer organization. They are volunteers. Do not kid yourself,
people who are talented and passionate, if they’re with you they are volunteering and you need to treat
them accordingly. The second thing is remember that no one wants to follow you to the future, they
want to co-create the future with you. It’s very different and then that’s what you need to think about.
And guess what? When you hire people, if they don’t argue with you, don’t hire them. You want
someone who will argue with you on a job interview. And the final piece of advice he gave was, “Keep it
fuzzy;” sometimes you need to be vague and fuzzy. So one of the things that I know Vineet had a lot of
trouble doing when he decided he didn’t want to be vague and fuzzy, but he decided that he was
answering too many questions, he became very transparent… There’s a lot of transparency in these
organizations to create trust. He became… he had a “You and I” where you would write in to the CEO
and he would answer you—you all know about that sort of thing. Finally one day he said, “You know
what? I’m falling into the trap myself.” So he now has something called, “My Problems.” “These are
the things that I didn’t know how to do this week.” Now mind you, it’s not that he’s going to do
everything you say when you write back, but, “This is what I had no idea about. What are your
thoughts?” And so at first when they all got this they’re like, “What do you mean the CEO has
something called ‘My Problems’ on the website and he sends those out.” He said it was his favorite email to do. [indiscernible] “What’s this email?” “These are my problems.” And so he had “My
Problems,” and then “You and I,” which was sort of yours—you know—and there’s a whole set of rules
about how those had to be answered, et cetera. But he said, “I’ve fallen into the same trap myself.”
And obviously we all have different levels of expertise, slices, et cetera, but let me push this back on
people. I have to tell you it’s as hard for, if you will, the followers to move into these ways as it is for the
leader sometimes, because it does require you taking on a lot of responsibility and accountability for
your work. So there’s a tug of war, I think, that can happen in this process. Yes sir?
>>: [indiscernible] distribute an attribute that count number of creative resolution, because that’s the
hardest, I think, of the three in general, particularly in groups that manage software. Lot of creative
people they’re doing a… the operational creative abrasion is much more easy to create here. [laughter]
Resolution is hardest to pass. One thing, [indiscernible] feel that the lost art, and they either leave, or
go to some other group, or work for some other company. But can you give some more examples
where it really worked and how does… how do you really make it work?
>> Linda Hill: Well, it does really work. It is very difficult work. As I said these… I think the thing about
it—and I’m not trying to avoid your question—is these are emotionally charged situations, which is what
you all are talking about because you actually care about it, right? It’s not like something you want to
give in on easily. That’s a part of the challenge here. And I want to tell you, as I said, we’ve looked at
many people, like Pentagram—I don’t know how many of you people know Pentagram—it’s a very highend design comp. These are very talented people who talk about putting their soul on the line when
their design… the man who designed the Harley Davidson museum—you know—these are real… he
talked about what it feels like to be in a conflict with his colleagues about a decision that they’re trying
to make. I think the… why… what I’ve tried to figure out is, leaders are more made than born—that’s
what the research tells us—but what is it about these leaders that allow them to be able to tolerate and
absorb a lot of that negativity and make it still stay constructive when the rest of us would fall apart—
right—or not know what to do and amplify these differences. And I think there’s partly… there is a bit of
a constitution or something they’ve learned about it and you can get to the other side and I, as I said,
this culture is an important piece of it. What I guess we saw in these organizations, it’s because they
know it’s usually a combination and they do more. I was… spent a day with Roger Martin who studies
opposable thinking, right? So I’m trying to figure out how do you help people do opposable thinking and
actually opposable decision making. I have to go spend another day with him. He told me he’s going to
show me the techniques they use, so then I’ll… give me an email, I’ll send you what he sends… what I
learn. But I think what you see in that process is they don’t assume that one group is supposed to win,
right? So… and that the learning… the thing is that you cannot lose the work. If I’ve worked for two
years on something, we cannot afford to lose that work. First of all, it’s just too valuable—the
knowledge. And if you’re in a place where you know that knowledge is still respected and is actually
utilized and, frankly, you’ve gone through a discovery-driven learning process where you’ve seen the
limitations yourself, right? No one else pointed them out to you. Bill didn’t say, “By the way, it doesn’t
work.” You had a prototype and you tested it and he’s just asked you, “Well, how did it work here,
there, and the other?” There is an intellectual honesty that you come back to. And I real… it is… it does
come together. I think to pull one piece of this out, it’s very difficult for me to give this talk in some
ways, it’s tricky because it is about bringing those pieces together. Does that make sense to you? But I
am… I really have… I did spend one day up in Toronto; I’m going back and I’m gonna… I’m very curious to
see how you help people really work with opposable thinking more actively so I can give you a more
precise answer. I’m on the website; if you e-mail me in about six months, I might have something to…
that I’m writing up about that, seriously. Yep. Yes?
>>: Linda, I think we have time for just one more.
>> Linda Hill: Okay. Yeah, sure.
>>: Well I’ll make it a… try and make it a long one then. [laughter]
>> Linda Hill: Oh, okay.
>>: I’ve been trying to formulate this challenge. It seems as if the book is targeted at more, these are
properties that companies that are innovative have in common, and yet most of those companies start
with an initial spark, and I personally am fascinated where the sparks comes from. But it seems this
book is… once you have the spark we’ll help you kindle it and make it sustainable. For example, John
Lasseter at Disney, and it could be argued Microsoft 2013 looked very similar to Disney 1983
[indiscernible] but that wasn’t creative abrasion that was just abrasion abrasion, right? [indiscernible]…
>> Linda Hill: Yeah. When he got kicked out?
>>: Exactly. He dumped John without… only John Lasseter, not that it’s all him…
>> Linda Hill: Yeah. No, no. Yeah.
>>: It’s this figure head right? I loved you saying, “Visionaries influence change, but sustainable leader’s
forward innovation.” But most of this has… the spark comes from… when you’re showing the Pixar map
and it’s two hundred people, takes them three years, but people like John Lasseter originally that’s just
his mind [indiscernible] because he was doing the shading and the modeling and the characters, and
when the initial spark is first formed… so when people are reading your book, because they’re a
company and they want to invest in innovation but they have to have a spark, just creating that culture
doesn’t mean the spark is going to generate a priori. If [indiscernible] challenge…
>> Linda Hill: I see what you… Where does it start? And maybe going back to the… So there are a
couple things that I wouldn’t claim to know more than I know—just be clear, right? ‘Cause I… well, it’s
described, but that’s why I took the time to tell you how I did the data. I actually went… in fact I was
really… it was fun. Eric Schmidt has a VC firm, so I went to speak to his portfolio managers who are…
these are new companies—right—about what we saw here and many of them were, “Wait a minute, I’m
the visionary, right?” So we were… talking about how they think about building their organizations over
time. I think, as I said, all the people I studied are visionaries. They really are. I mean they’re very… and
I… and they’re very talented individuals. So I don’t know that I haven’t studied a situation where you
haven’t had that and it’s—you know—and I…‘cause I haven’t seen it, so I don’t know the answer to your
question. So Ed Catmull is the founder of Pixar, right? But the three of them, Steve Jobs, Ed, and John,
they actually, as a collective, ran that organization for many years. And they think it was very important
that the three of them, it wasn’t just a single individual who actually… but when you ask people even
though you just brought up John—you know—why is Pixar the way Pixar is? They tell you Ed. You
mentioned John, right? So I just want to… it’s an interesting sort of deal there. There’s nothing
particularly… and I think… I find Ed very charismatic personally. I think though, that most—you know—
he’s… most people probably wouldn’t. Actually, I don’t think you’d find Bill charismatic. So the notion
of what these… how these people carry themselves and what they’re like, they’re not necessarily people
you would notice, or they’re not in the model of the charismatic… I mean, Nelson Mandela is
charismatic, but I don’t know if you… but if you actually ask the people who are with him there were
many, many people who are more charismatic than him they would tell you—right—who were in that
movement. So… and I’ve been look… so I don’t know what to tell you whether you can start it, but what
I do see in these organizations is these people are always described as very demanding and very
generous. And they’re very generous people, so they assume that everybody has a slice of genius, right?
That’s a big assumption, right?
>>: Maybe a next book, ‘cause, I mean, it seems like this is the [indiscernible]…
>> Linda Hill: You want me to do… [laughter] What…
>>: Take a spark and blow it [indiscernible]…
>> Linda Hill: What book do you want me to write? Where does it come from in the first time?
>>: The abrasion abrasion. The actual spark, that thing that’s cultivated by these people into a
sustainable... [indiscernible]
>> Linda Hill: As opposed to… these people. Okay, it’s a collective act. I don’t… I mean, some of them
are… I do know the founder of HCL, Shiv, I did meet one of the founders, there were five of them; I
studied eBay almost since its inception and eBay Germany, in particular, is the piece that we wrote
about. They acquired it very early in its life and studied it over time. So I don’t know, you know. I mean,
a entrepreneur, you have to have that commitment to get that done, but I don’t know. I see what
you’re asking and I don’t… the egg and chicken problem here. Yeah. Oh well, the last thing I will say and
then I have to let you go, is that actually a number of the leaders told me they learned to lead this way
once they realized that lightning doesn’t strike twice necessarily, right? So actually, Vineet said, “I used
to be command and control, et cetera, but when I understood that we needed to innovate time and
again, it wasn’t just about me, then I needed to change my mindset about leadership.” So he learned it.
Luca also described learning it, actually. I just said… and actually there’s one of the other leader’s, Amy
described learning it. And she’s a litigator so, believe me, right? So it’s not a easy… but she gets it to the
point that if you come to her house for dinner, she makes sure that she sits in the low power spot. Very
aware of role modelling, exactly what needs to happen here—you know—but she’s obviously a litigator
who will take you to court and make sure she wins if she’s in that courtroom, but when she’s leading,
behaves in a very different way. So, learned it, right?
>>: Yeah.
>> Linda Hill: Yeah.
>>: Thank you.
>> Linda Hill: Yes. I need to go. I’ll stick around, but I need to let you all go. Can I take this last question
quietly? Okay, thank you. [applause] Yes.